Radeon RX 5500 XT vs Radeon RX 590

Intro

Compare all that to the Radeon RX 590, which comes with a clock frequency of 1469 MHz and a GDDR5 memory frequency of 2000 MHz. It also uses a 256-bit memory bus, and makes use of a 12 nm design. It is comprised of 2304 SPUs, 144 Texture Address Units, and 32 Raster Operation Units.

Display Graphs

Hide Graphs

Power Usage and Theoretical Benchmarks

Power Consumption (Max TDP)

Radeon RX 5500 XT		130 Watts
Radeon RX 590		175 Watts
	Difference: 45 Watts (35%)

Memory Bandwidth

The Radeon RX 590 should in theory be a little bit faster than the Radeon RX 5500 XT overall. (explain)

Radeon RX 590		262144 MB/sec
Radeon RX 5500 XT		229376 MB/sec
	Difference: 32768 (14%)

Texel Rate

The Radeon RX 590 will be much (about 40%) more effective at AF than the Radeon RX 5500 XT. (explain)

Radeon RX 590		211536 Mtexels/sec
Radeon RX 5500 XT		151096 Mtexels/sec
	Difference: 60440 (40%)

Pixel Rate

If using lots of anti-aliasing is important to you, then the Radeon RX 5500 XT is superior to the Radeon RX 590, not by a very large margin though. (explain)

Radeon RX 5500 XT		54944 Mpixels/sec
Radeon RX 590		47008 Mpixels/sec
	Difference: 7936 (17%)

Please note that the above 'benchmarks' are all just theoretical - the results were calculated based on the card's specifications, and real-world performance may (and probably will) vary at least a bit.

Price Comparison

Specifications

Memory Bandwidth: Memory bandwidth is the largest amount of information (measured in megabytes per second) that can be transported across the external memory interface in one second. It is calculated by multiplying the interface width by the speed of its memory. If it uses DDR type memory, it should be multiplied by 2 again. If it uses DDR5, multiply by 4 instead. The higher the memory bandwidth, the better the card will be in general. It especially helps with AA, HDR and higher screen resolutions.

Texel Rate: Texel rate is the maximum number of texture map elements (texels) that are applied per second. This figure is calculated by multiplying the total number of texture units of the card by the core clock speed of the chip. The better this number, the better the graphics card will be at texture filtering (anisotropic filtering - AF). It is measured in millions of texels processed in a second.

Pixel Rate: Pixel rate is the maximum amount of pixels the video card can possibly write to the local memory per second - measured in millions of pixels per second. The figure is calculated by multiplying the amount of Render Output Units by the the core clock speed. ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines - sometimes also referred to as Render Output Units) are responsible for drawing the pixels (image) on the screen. The actual pixel fill rate is also dependant on many other factors, especially the memory bandwidth - the lower the bandwidth is, the lower the potential to get to the max fill rate.